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Militants Said to Flee Before U.S. Offensive

Iraqi soldiers handed out food and water to residents of Baquba Friday in a humanitarian mission organized by the United States Army.Credit
Scott Nelson/World Picture Network, for The New York Times

BAGHDAD, June 22 — The operational commander of troops battling to drive fighters with Al Qaeda from Baquba said Friday that 80 percent of the top Qaeda leaders in the city fled before the American-led offensive began earlier this week. He compared their flight with the escape of Qaeda leaders from Falluja ahead of an American offensive that recaptured that city in 2004.

In an otherwise upbeat assessment, Lt. Gen. Raymond T. Odierno, the second-ranking American commander in Iraq, told reporters that leaders of Al Qaeda in Mesopotamia had been alerted to the Baquba offensive by widespread public discussion of the American plan to clear the city before the attack began. He portrayed the Qaeda leaders’ escape as cowardice, saying that “when the fight comes, they leave,” abandoning “midlevel” Qaeda leaders and fighters to face the might of American troops — just, he said, as they did in Falluja.

Some American officers in Baquba have placed blame for the Qaeda leaders’ flight on public remarks about the offensive in the days before it began by top American commanders, including Gen. David H. Petraeus, the overall commander in Iraq. But General Odierno cast the issue in broader terms, saying Qaeda leaders were bound to know an attack was coming in light of President Bush’s decision to pour nearly 30,000 additional troops into the fight in a bid to secure Baghdad and areas around the capital that have been insurgent strongholds. That included Baquba, which lies 40 miles north.

“Frankly, I think they knew an operation was coming in Baquba,” General Odierno said in a teleconference briefing with Pentagon reporters from the American military headquarters in Baghdad. “They watched the news. They understood we had a surge. They understood Baquba was designated as a problem area. So they knew we were going to come sooner or later.”

Still, he implied American commanders may have played a part by flagging the offensive in advance. “I think they were tipped off by us talking about the surge, the fact that we have a problem in Diyala Province,” he said.

In his news conference, General Odierno offered the broadest assessment yet of the multipronged American offensive around Baghdad that got under way this week, using the additional troops sent to Iraq as part of Mr. Bush’s troop buildup. Despite the flight of the Qaeda leaders from Baquba — a pattern that appears to have been replicated in other areas included in the new offensive, including Qaeda strongholds along the Tigris River south of Baghdad — he adopted an upbeat tone, saying the offensive held “a good potential” for reducing the Qaeda threat to the point that American force levels in Iraq could be reduced by next spring.

First, he said, American and Iraqi troops would need to sustain their crackdown long enough for Iraqi forces to move into neighborhoods cleared of Qaeda fighters and hold them. This is a pattern American commanders have tried unsuccessfully before, as in a failed attempt to secure wide areas of Baghdad last summer. But General Odierno said Iraqi forces were “getting better,” “staying and fighting,” “taking casualties” and adding an additional 7,500 soldiers to their overall strength every five weeks.

“If you ask me today, I think by the spring, or earlier, they will be able to take on a larger portion of their security, which means I think potentially we could have a decision to reduce our forces,” he said. But he quickly tempered his optimism, aware that top generals here have made repeated forecasts of a turnarounds in the war, only for the situation to get progressively worse. “You know, there’s so many things that could be happening between now and then, as we’ve all learned,” he said.

The forecast of a possible troop reduction by the spring of 2008 had strong political echoes, coinciding as it did with the date for beginning an American troop withdrawal that has been favored by some leading Democrats in Congress. It also coincides with the April 2008 date that American commanders in Iraq have said they have been given by the Army and Marine Corps leadership in Washington as the last point at which the current American force level of about 156,000 — augmented by the additional five Army brigades and Marine units deployed as part of the so-called surge — can be sustained, given staffing constraints.

Addressing the problems facing American troops in Baquba, General Odierno played down the significance of the Qaeda leaders fleeing ahead of the offensive, saying American forces would hunt them down. “I guarantee you, we’re going to track down those leaders,” he said. “And we’re in the process of doing that. We know who they are, and we’re coming after them, and we’re going to work that extremely hard.”

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Before the Baquba operation, American commanders had said that one difference from previous offensives that had failed to net top Qaeda leaders would be the use of “blocking maneuvers” around the city to close off escape routes.

Although that appears to have failed, American commanders in Baquba said Friday that several hundred Qaeda fighters — about 80 percent of the recruits who were there when the offensive began Tuesday — remained in the western half of the city, and that there would be tough fighting to root them out for units of the 10,000-person force of American and Iraqi troops committed to the battle.

The force is one of the largest assembled for any operation outside Baghdad since the recapture of Falluja, and closely resembles, in its aims, the Falluja offensive of November 2004.

American hopes that the Falluja offensive would deal a mortal blow to Al Qaeda were thwarted when the leaders who fled the city moved elsewhere, and resumed the Islamic militants’ trademark pattern of suicide bombings and assassinations at a higher intensity than before. Since Falluja, Qaeda groups have shown a remarkable resilience in the face of relentless pursuit by the American forces, regrouping time and again after American offensives. Even Falluja has not escaped. American commanders said this week that, more than 30 months after the city was recaptured, Qaeda groups have reinfiltrated the city, mounting suicide bombing attacks, assassinating police and city council leaders and forcing a fresh American and Iraqi offensive this month that has been aimed at capturing or killing the Qaeda fighters.

After more than three years of saying publicly that they had all the troops they needed for the war here, American commanders have begun acknowledging in the past year that the ability of the Qaeda groups to establish new strongholds after old ones are destroyed — and to regenerate their leadership — has owed much to the fact that American manpower has been severely stretched.

But with all the additional Army brigades ordered into the war by Mr. Bush now in the field, along with additional Marine units, the commanders here now have more firepower than they have had at any time since the American invasion in 2003. With that, the American generals face what they have acknowledged to be the best, and possibly last, chance to persuade critics in Congress and a disillusioned American public that persisting in Iraq is worthwhile.

General Odierno, at his news conference, sketched the sweep of the new offensive. He said the main thrust was aimed at Qaeda strongholds in Diyala Province, with its capital at Baquba; at the Arab Jabour area south of Baghdad, where Qaeda groups have sent wave after wave of car and truck bomb attacks into the capital; in scattered training areas and safe havens west and northwest of the capital; and in Baghdad itself, where major American operations have begun in the past weeks in the districts of Adhamiya, Rashid and Mansour.

“So far, within Baquba,” General Odierno said, “there have been many successes: four weapons caches have been found and cleared; three truck and car bombs have been captured and destroyed; over 25 deep-buried I.E.D.’s have been found and cleared, many of them pointed out by the local populace; and 10 house-bound I.E.D.’s have been destroyed — those are 10 houses that have been rigged with thousands of pounds of explosives to try and kill us as we enter.” I.E.D., or improvised explosive device, is military jargon for a homemade bomb.